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Isaiah Berlin described the intellectuals of [Mikhail] Bakunin's Red bureaucracy as a secular priesthood.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
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Human Rights Activist
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Media Critic
Opinion Journalist
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Philosopher
East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
A. Noam Chomsky
Chomsky
Isaiah
Intellectuals
Priesthood
Berlin
Bureaucracy
Described
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Radical activists can't ignore the fact that we live in this world, like it or not, and have to make difficult decisions about which paths are the best - or sometimes, the least harmful. There are no abstract formulas. Have to think through each case on its own.
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The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.
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The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.
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Anyone in a position to overcome barriers to free thought and communication should do so.
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Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.
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One of the real problems of society is that its far too atomized, what sociologists call secondary associations.
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Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege.
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...free enterprise, [is] a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich.
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Whoever sets the agenda controls the outcome of the debate
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I think the Christian Coalition could be extremely dangerous. We should always be concerned when any group wants to impose their doctrinal concerns on all. To an extent that's what they are trying to do.
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You have to rely on yourself and your associates - gifts don't come from above you're going to win them, or you won't have them.
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There’s no more morality in world affairs, fundamentally, than there was at the time of Genghis Khan.
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There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn't mean the soldier that committed them - that means the commanders.
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Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.
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We have a record for Nawaz Sharif but not the others. And judging by the record, it's pretty hard to be optimistic. His [Sharif's] previous governments were very corrupt and regressive in the policies pursued.
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Women taking care of children . . . it makes sense to pay them for that work . . . they should be paid for it, but that requires tax payments. And the same is true about protection of the environment.
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There was great anxiety about Russian intervention in the recent German elections, perhaps contributing to the frightening surge of support for the right-wing nationalist, if not neo-fascist, Alternative for Germany.
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A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.
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I haven't seen any claim that Piraha lacks recursion, that is, that there are a finite number of sentences or sentence frames. If that's so, it would mean that the speakers of this language aren't making use of a capacity that they surely have, a normal situation plenty of people throughout history would drown if they fall into water.
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Insofar as the universities are free and independent, they will also be subversive, in the sense that dominant structures of power and their ideological support will be subjected to challenge and critique, a counterpart to attitudes that are fostered in the hard sciences wherever they are taken seriously.
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